Talk:Decay/@comment-178.159.165.187-20170916180410
My HZE is 60 and i was at 8k Helium. Here's my decay run and what i could've done to make it better: I spent most of the time with turkimp bonus to metal (and after Z45 to wood) and had to put ~10% employed Trimps as scientists to keep up. worked well I ran cheap fast maps (random, minimum difficulty & size) every zone with repeat for items - saving fragments for Gateways, not repeating more to not get stuck and keep the turkimp up - map bonus just about covers for stack damage loss. Upgrading Equipment ASAP (no block shield). Obviously at Z16 i ran Anger instead. Bought a total of 22 wormholes (20 at 37 and 2 more for a Coordination issue), somewhere around Z43 i wasn't keeping up with weapon upgrades at all (because my production focus switched to Gyms) so i ran Trimple of Doom for the resource double up. It made my ride to Z48 smooth (1.5h game time + a couple pauses) 48-53 took me 30 minutes game time +1h thinking pauses to figure out resource management and at 53 i got stuck because i overindexed in block and didn't have enough damage with, i think, coord 47 and mace tier 9 x1 to get through the last row of the zone in reasonable time (stacks caught up to me). At that point i had 400 Tributes (not sure how close to optimal is that), so closing for the night gave me enough resources even at 7% gathering speed to get coord 48, and 49 after getting the collectors. finishing the z48 row at 999 stacks took another 30 minutes and i went on to finish the challange shortly after. With total game time 15h, at the time of finishing the challange I had: 14 collectors, 22 wormholes, 40 gateways and ~100 of each lower tier housing, Coordination 49, Gym 152 with 234 Trainers, Dagger to Battleaxe tier 9 x2, Tribute 410, Nursery 120 (i felt like i needed it at some point i guess). Other limiting factors: I only have Whipimp and Tauntimp, perks mostly optimized with Perky for zone 56 (Carpentry 14, Agility 16, Motivation 12, Artisanistry 9). Finishing other available challanges first definitely helped (having AutoUgrade, Resilience 1, and start from Scientist II) Things of note: 8k He makes this challange very hands-on. Abandoning soldiers to farm loot maps at each Blimp until the production slows (challange effect is x1 at 460 stacks) AND having at least one of the map loot Imp-orts would probably make it a smooth run (1 day no resource gathering breaks). While turkimp bonus is awesome (i had 100% uptime in zones 1-48), a different approach would be to manually get some science once in a while since it's not affected by Decay (e.g. when allowing the production to die down at the Blimp) and skip scientists. I was planning to save the ToD resource double up for Z54 (or later) and that can also be a better strategy. I'm also still panic-buying storage when resource income outpaces my building orders, so this run was by far not the best that can be done with 8k He. And never buy Gyms before 25 - they just clog up the building queue, building them later with high Efficiency is trivial. My advice - follow Helium recommendations from more experienced players (I would need to waste even more on wormholes to get through it in one go at 8k He), get Imp-orts first, and abandon the challange (or simply Portal and start again with a bit more Helium) if you get stuck. Even though there's almost nothing that can't be fixed with waiting a day (unless you got stuck at the beginning of a zone before block covers all the damage), a do-over is better for learning purposes, even if Helium gain is negligible.